A blog mostly about technical difficulties and how they were overcome

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Sighthound Video

Several years ago, I looked for an ip camera system that would help reduce noise (false positives), install simply and work with a wide variety of cameras and encoding formats. I wanted a software package that I could install on flexible computer hardware without any specialized camera needs acting as a central recording hub. Vitamin D Video fit the bill and we used this system with various cameras from Panasonic, Axis, & Sharx.

In dealing with Vitamin D Video, I felt that we were one of their fringe customers using a higher number of cameras than typical. I scaled our hardware with a high end processor and respectable raid array for the job. This system worked well for years until moving to a larger facility this year with some new cameras. The HD video revolution has pushed resolutions higher quickly and at low cost. Mid-tier cameras in 2013 ($350) are dramatically better than some expensive ones in 2008 ($1500).

The new cameras came with new Codecs and some new requirements. Sadly Vitamin D Video was not continuing development. I got everything working using some older codecs and using reduced resolution. After contacting Vitamin D for news about development, I found that Sighthound Video was picking up the project where Vitamin D left off. Initially I thought this might be a rag-tag group of former developers until they really started to push the platform development at an unexpectedly rapid pace.

Now I have most of the features necessary for our multi camera environment with an excellent platform that is seeing active development again. I highly recommend this platform as it takes a lot of the work out of similar options (even the free ones and the more expensive ones). http://sighthoundlabs.com

Windows 7 for the server PC. The client PCs are a mix of Vista, XP, & 7. The changes they have made in the last year are significant and have made iterative improvements now on already solid hardware. I am happy to see an up-featured version for use with a larger quantity of cameras as the basic software is vastly better than the other enterprise solutions I’ve tried.